As it is known in the art, transmissions in noisy systems are often encoded into a sequence of symbols in such a manner that the message can be recovered from the symbols even when received in the presence of noise or other impairments. Examples of such systems include artificial systems like cell phone networks, and natural systems, such as human speech. When received, these encoded messages must be decoded by the receiving device. Many encoding schemes employ error detection and correction to increase reliability and accuracy of the received messages. Some decoding schemes make use of a tree data structure (or simply a “tree”) containing all possible decoded messages for each received transmission. In such a tree, each path from the root node to an edge (i.e., leaf node) of the tree represents a potential message. However, if the tree of all possible messages is large, it may be expensive to implement a decoder in hardware because of the large amount of circuitry required. Also, given fast data rates for transmissions, the decoding process for some tree-based decoding schemes may take a prohibitively long time to complete.